Pittsburgh City Council is continuing to debate which “inclusionary zoning” proposal should be adopted in its quest for “affordable housing.”
Talk about a false choice in this perverted exercise in how the city should commit economic suicide.
The facts of the matter remain this: Inclusionary zoning is a lousy public policy that, as is par for the “progressive” course, ends up producing the exact opposite of what the good-intentions crowd proffers.
Per the Post-Gazette:
“The competing proposals would apply to developers building more than 20 housing units or substantially improving such existing buildings. [Mayor Ed] Gainey is pushing for a citywide mandate that requires builders to set aside 10 percent of units as affordable to households earning at or below 50 percent of the area’s median income.
[City Councilman Bob] Charland’s proposal would require developers to earmark 20 percent of units as affordable to households in different income brackets, ranging from 50 percent to 99 percent of the area’s median income. Neighborhoods can opt out, and developers can choose to pay a fee of up to $50,000 per unit instead of meeting affordability requirements. Mr. Gainey’s proposal allows no exceptions.”
Additionally, Charland’s proposal “calls for public funding to close any financial gaps in affordable housing projects, money that would likely come from the city itself or its Urban Redevelopment Authority,” the P-G reports.
In other words, taxpayers.
And as we’ve repeatedly documented, inclusionary zoning generally does two things – it reduces the number of housing units built and raises the prices of the reduced number that are built, as Pittsburgh’s limited neighborhood foray into the practice shows.
As the P-G notes, in Lawrenceville, where inclusionary zoning was implemented six years ago, observers have said it has “slowed construction, pushing developers to build elsewhere and contributing to rent increases.”
“Rents in Lawrenceville have increased by 42 percent since 2018, according to Chris Beam, a representative of the affordable housing advocacy group Pro-Housing Pittsburgh. The organization previously said that existing policies have created only 35 affordable units since they were implemented.”
That’s hardly a marketplace endorsement of such a nearsighted public policy.
Writing more than two decades ago for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), Benjamin Powell and Edward Stringham concluded that inclusionary zoning is not an effective way to make housing more affordable.
“Inclusionary zoning is nothing more than a price control,” they argued in a 2003 white paper. “By diminishing incentives for landowners to provide land for housing and incentives for builders to undertake projects, inclusionary zoning restricts the supply of housing. This drives up the price of all other market-priced homes and makes housing less affordable.”
They note that even the few families who do get the price-controlled units do not receive the full benefits of homeownership since their potential appreciation is limited.
“A free market in housing can benefit all income groups and keep prices affordable,” Powell and Stringham stress. “The problem is that existing government land-use regulations and zoning practices have prevented the supply of homes from increasing fast enough to meet demand.
“If promoting affordable housing is the goal, the answer is to roll back existing regulations that discourage the supply of housing. That includes repealing the very inclusionary zoning ordinances that were passed in response to increasing prices,” the AIER researchers conclude.
There’s no reason to change that conclusion in 2025. But it will take nothing less than an epiphany for a sadly rising number of public policy makers to change their devotion to the delusive sophism that inclusionary zoning remains.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
